Matthew Stallone pointed out to me a few days ago that a marketing email being sent to many real estate photographers by Images Re-Touch is using an image stolen from Scott Hargis’s Lighting Interiors book (Figure 14.8 on page 169). They cropped the image to get rid of the “Figure 14.8” on the lower left of the image.

So I would check their website and other marketing materials to make sure they haven’t stolen your image(s) too.

Also, given their attitude toward ethics, we do not recommend them as a retouching vendor!

Hi every one,
this is really annoying, and disturbing, i would be ashame of myself, (stealing someones work and publish it to the net!!
how stupid can one be!!, it is unfair ,foolish, and incapable, such so called “photographers” should be expelled!

This is becoming a huge problem everywhere… I’ve been getting more and more notifications from clients who find images that I shot for them, being used by others online, unlicensed. I’ve done individual image searches through Google with some success, but it is impossible to search each of the thousands of images that I’ve shot. It would be nice to be able to search for metadata, like camera serial# or my name/copyright info; a photographer can then browse the search results, checking the sources.

Holy smokes they are insane. Also, never hire someone with such poor grammar. Editing images is much more challenging than writing a few sentences. Every other word is wrong or misspelled lol.

Stealing images is sad and common. I work with many clients that do it and think its ok despite what I tell them.

My girlfriend and I were recently shopping for granite for countertops in our new house. Every slab had a pic on it and some were ok but most were bad (real bad) I approached them about photography at the end and they said. (Laughing) “oh, no thank you. We just download these off the internet, when and where we can find them”. Even more sad, every granite store we visited did this. The granite is $50-90 a freeking sqft. Our final granite purchase was over $3000 and these cats are stealing images. How sad but that’s the world we seem to live in these days.

It seems so flagrant that it makes me wonder if there isn’t more to the story. Has anyone reached out to them and received any explanation? I am sure Scott has been informed, has he and what does he have to say?

You would think anyone being in the photo business would be aware of the ethics, let alone the rules regarding a persons work. I don’t this is a stupid mistake, rather a shameless one.

@Jerry – Yes, I’ve discussed this with Scott. This is not the first violation of copyright issue that we’ve had with Scott’s book. All issues are in countries that give us little or no options. I’m frankly not interested in the story this company has about this behavior. The behavior speaks for itself… they are not making sure they have the rights to images they are using in their marketing.

It’s part of being in the business — this stuff happens. Thanks to all the people who emailed me pointing it out, I even got the email myself a few days ago.
This one is especially ironic, but unfortunately it’s pretty commonplace. I had a conversation with a would-be photographer in Vancouver a month or two ago because his website and an ad he placed on Craigslist had my entire portfolio on it.
And you only need to Google a few select phrases from my official Bio to find scores of photographers around the world who have plagiarized it.

It’s annoying, but that’s about all it is. India is particularly hard to deal with when it comes to this stuff, but we’ll see what happens.